CLEVELAND — Measuring purchasing power by dollars or other currencies is a method of taking a look at wealth.
But at FreightWaves’ Way forward for Supply Chain event, Marian Tupy said the most effective metric is “time prices”: the period of time needed at a specific job to buy a specific good.
Tupy was a keynote speaker on Day One in all FOSC, which attracted greater than 1,000 attendees. He’s the founder and editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior fellow on the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. He sat down for an interview with FreightWaves.
Tupy’s fundamental message is one in all optimism, not driven by a relentless feel-good philosophy but founded on data that shows enormous ongoing progress within the human condition. For instance, based on Swedish data, which he said is a few of the most complete over time, babies born in that country within the 1700s had a few 50% likelihood of living beyond their first birthday. Today, that number is much less, and people deaths are generally resulting from congenital defects, Tupy said.
Too many persons are unwilling to simply accept these gains and as an alternative see society on a downward slide, in line with Tupy. There may be “actually historical amnesia” about where things were in history and where they at the moment are, he added.
And on the subject of time prices, Tupy, each in person and in his 2022 book “Superabundance,” can cite a litany of services that take far fewer hours of labor to buy today than up to now.
He used the instance of chickens and eggs in his fireside chat to detail the methodology for calculating time prices.
Chicken as a meal, in line with Tupy, is now considered not only healthy but “it’s one in all the most cost effective meats you possibly can get within the U.S.” Up until the twentieth century, Tupy said, “people rarely ate chicken” due to its cost.
Doing so was a standing symbol, he added, because “in the event you kill a chicken, you furthermore may killed the secondary products of a chicken, which was eggs. So that you needed to be extremely wealthy in an effort to signal to the world which you could actually get rid of what is basically a food-producing machine.”
But as productivity and wealth have increased, that has modified, Tupy said. The quantity of labor that a blue-collar employee needed to rack up in 1920 to buy one chicken would now buy a employee 26 chickens. And the work needed to amass one egg 100 years ago would get 36 eggs today.
Tupy said his book reviews “tons of of various commodities, foodstuffs, fuels, minerals and metals” all with the identical story: The variety of hours needed to buy those items has plummeted over time.
The worth in measuring prices and wealth that way is that there isn’t any need to regulate for currency fluctuations or imprecise measurements of inflation, Tupy said. Measuring the variety of hours a Chinese employee 100 years ago needed to purchase a certain product can easily be compared against what it takes a U.S. employee today or up to now to purchase that good. And there may be one constant, he added: “Everybody has 24 hours in a day.”
The less hours needed to secure life’s necessities means more time for other pursuits, Tupy said, “like having fun with a sport or traveling the world. So in some ways, time prices are the true prices.”
Tupy summarized his review of the past century or so on this statement: “Relative to wages, all the pieces has turn out to be inexpensive, including gold, platinum and silver and oil and gas. What really is increasing over time is human productivity and human wages.”
In his words, Tupy just isn’t an “anarchist.” While the self-described libertarian said government “does a number of things that create more problems than contribute to solutions,” he added that there exists a “role for the federal government to play in global commons.”
Specifically, if there are resources that don’t have any private property rights, resembling air or water, government motion to preserve them is “not unwelcome, and mandatory.”
Asked about climate change, Tupy went right to what he sees as a possible solution: nuclear. It will “enable humanity to provide reliably as much electricity as we could possibly want, with zero emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We all know the way to do that.”
Industry concerns in regards to the far-reaching impact of the California Clean Fleets and California Clean Trucks rules might be heard in Tupy’s description of where government regulation historically has gone. Environmental standards up to now, Tupy said, have been “simply enough for personal corporations to catch up, because governments don’t wish to create a situation where hundreds of thousands of individuals will lose their jobs because a whole industry has to shut down because you can not meet a very unrealistic standard.”
His concern is that “the pendulum has now shifted completely to the alternative side. We aren’t any longer taking a look at environmental regulations in lots of instances as an issue of striking the fitting balance.” The deal with the environment, he said, “has turn out to be like a faith where the negative consequences of presidency actions don’t matter.”
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Way forward for Supply Chain
JUNE 21-22, 2023 • CLEVELAND, OH • IN-PERSON EVENT
The best minds within the transportation, logistics and provide chain industries will share insights, predict future trends and showcase emerging technology the FreightWaves way–with engaging discussions, rapid-fire demos, interactive sponsor kiosks and more.